This seems to be the first official video of touch-screen vote-flipping 2012, reportedly captured today in Pennsylvania, where elected officials so disrespect their own voters that they still force almost all of them to vote on these 100% unverifiable systems...

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

Of course, this same sort of thing has happened every single election since 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting was forced on Americans ten years ago or so, but when it was first heavily reported by Democrats as having happened in 2004 all across the country, Republicans (and elections officials of all parties) called them "conspiracy theorists" and sore losers. Here's just a couple of examples caught on video from 2008. I've even written an entire chapter for Sonoma University's Project Censored book, Censored 2010, about the largely unreported nationwide vote-flipping epidemic during the 2008 election.

This year, it's been the Republicans who have finally decided, wisely, to be concerned about it. Last week, the GOP sent a letter [PDF] to top election officials in six different states, offering bad advice to them about what they should do, after a few unconfirmed complaints of touch-screen votes flipping from Romney to Obama were reported.

We've only seen a few reports of this, but don't necessarily doubt it. While, historically, most touch-screen votes flip away from Ds, we've seen reports of them flipping to Ds on a few occasions as well. Either way, these systems are 100% unverifiable (with or without a so-called paper trail print out, as some have) and should never be used in any American election. The GOP has sent their letter to Secretaries of State in NV, OH, KS, MO and CO, and the Executive Dir. of the Election Board in NC. Three of those folks are Ds, three are Rs. The letter requests that they "Make arrangements for additional technicians on Election Day in case of increased calibration problems." Of course, when machines flip votes, they should be taken out of service, not re-calibrated when they are in "Election Mode" and most sensitive to manipulation. The letter also foolishly asks for signs to be posted warning voters to "double-check that the voting machine properly recorded their vote", which is, with these sorts of machines, scientifically impossible.

Fortunately, it's being reported that the machine seen above has been taken out of service, rather than re-calibrated as so often happens, and as the GOP stupidly requested be done in such instances.

[Update: Mother Jones is now reporting that PA Dept of State officials are saying "they recalibrated the machine, did a test run, and put it back online." That's the dumbest thing they could do. Wonder who "fixed" it?]

All of that said, last night we offered several tips for voting today in ways that might help maximize the chances of your vote being counted and counted accurately. We included these quick tips on WHAT TO DO IF YOUR VOTE FLIPS ON A TOUCH-SCREEN MACHINE:

Try to capture it with your cell phone camera.

Call poll supervisors to observe the problem.

Fill out a problem report.

Refuse to vote on that machine.

Request that the machine be taken out of service.

Get the serial number of the machine if possible (may be difficult in some cases).

Tell other voters in line which machine it was and that they should NOT vote on that machine!

Report it to county/town election office.

Report it to the Secretary of State.

Call local reporters and tell them the story.

Call 866-OUR-VOTE and tell them.

Contact bloggers and Election Integrity websites.

Raise holy hell.

Remember: No matter what you see on the screen of your touch-screen vote, even on the machines with so-called "Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails" printed on the side, those votes are 100% unverifiable (like the one that President Obama himself foolishly cast last week.). Try, at all costs, to vote on a paper ballot instead, if you are allowed to do so in your state or county!

But, also remember, it doesn't necessarily mean someone has hacked the machine. If they had wanted to do that, they likely wouldn't have let you see that they were doing it. They'd just have let you vote as normal, and then recorded the vote the way they wanted to inside the machine. Neither you, nor anybody else, would ever know about it.

When it happens, chances are the touch-screen on the incredibly poorly made machine has has fallen out of calibration. It's probably not on purpose, not that that matters to you or anybody else. But it underscores again what we have been yelling and screaming for years: 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems (and other Direct Record Electronic voting systems like them) should never be used, and should be entirely banned from use in American elections. Period.

Rethuglicans are now "reporting" that machines tried to switch their Romney votes to Obama in order to create a false "equivalency" about this problem. Strangely enough, they never seem to get any video of it or anybody to be able to actually confirm or replicate the problem. I guess those Rethuglcians can't afford smartphones with video, yeah, that's it.

Programmer here. You all are making a mistake if you think "flips" on screen are evidence of the program changing the vote. The device is not mechanical; if the program changes a vote, the screen does have to change to reflect the change. It would be sloppy and stupid, unthinkable, to forget to tell the screen to display the voter's intent while actually changing the vote internally. What is happening is probably worse; the programs running in the Windows environment are periodically failing to refresh their displays properly. If you've ever used a program and watch video artifacts pop up, you know what I mean. It's just bad coding running in a bad operating system. It means the coders are not very good.

BUT. The real cheating would not be done at the machine you are using. To many to manipulate easily, too many chances to be caught, too many ways to fail. To flip an election, you'd hit the accumulator systems that the individual voting PCs (and they are PCs!) are allegedly uploading their data to. Since recounts are impossible, there's no risk of discovery. The manipulation can be done from a central controller, say through a back door that was Trojaned in a couple of weeks back, maskerading as an election results upload enhancement. They don't have to hit many boxes, not in a close race. Just a few accumulators. A thousand or ten here, a few more thousand there, and they win the state of Ohio, let's just say.

Never understood screen "calibration". The screens are standardized, and the programs use the operating system and standard libraries to write to the displays. I never had to "calibrate" a screen on all the systems I wrote from scratch. The screen is not a physical plate or some movie screen you have to aim at. Your program runs or it does not run. And I don't see how a lack of "calibrization", whatever that hell that is, would make a vote bounce around the choices on the screen. It simply can't. Simply. Can. Not. You're being lied to. No one who writes code has to "calibrate" their screen. It's like a plumber telling you he has to "franchelize the coordinating lobe". It ain't true. The concept doesn't apply. Am I stating this forcefully enough??

Let me put it this way: has any web designer any of you have worked with ever - EVER - told you that your web page needed to be recalibrated? They don't because there is no damned such thing as calibrating a damned PC. This is infuriating. You might want to calibrate an automated manufacturing system, yes, in a thousand different ways. But not a glorified counting abacus using a standard OS and programming language. You ever see an ATM down for "recalibration"? Ever see ANY PC down for recalibration? Ever ask what the hell they mean by that, and what, exactly in the nine hells, would they be calibrating?

Did a peek at Slashdot about recalibration. Appears resistive screens of the old school require - occasionally - recalibration. But they do not float more than a few pixels, not inches of screen real estate. A screen may stop responding if you don't tap it just right - but, that doesn't mean that votes flip around the screen. And, it sure as hell means that the machines should be scrapped. Recalibration? My god. The ways these things can be broken are endless.

Well, that was educational. And frightening. I will admit I had no idea there was such a problem with screen calibration when one uses old resistive tech. So, rolling back the rage on the alleged BS about calibration; I was wrong. However: WHAT the hell?? Screen icons don't match what the computer senses? I can't process how bad this is.

Thanks for the diversion on this strange, strange day. I went with you the whole way on that little odyssey. Enjoyed it all. Especially where you acknowledged your mistake after your considerable rant. Loved the rant, too, though. Baseline seems always to come back to--the machines are pure crap.

My guess (which I think is cynical enough for U.S. elections) is that the "calibration" is some kind of software setting. The intention would be that the voting machine company's customers would like the ability to adjust the area that corresponds to each candidate slightly, so one candidate gets more accidental votes. That machine in the video's calibration was set too obvious, so it really did need calibration. The preferred calibration would be maybe 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down the Obama button. That way, if somebody tries to test the machine, it won't look blatantly rigged, as it would if it were made to report different votes than what was selected. If somebody tested the machine and hit a button a little bit off-center, got the wrong candidate, and tried again and it worked, they would just blame themselves. This kind of vote-rigging would only make a small difference in a few mis-votes
from not-very-attentive people, but it could make the difference in a close race.